The New Covenant
After supper he took another cup of wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you.
Luke 22:20 NLT
Covenant is an eternal binding promise that two parties will love one another unconditionally. This eternal covenant is not a contract. In a contract, the relationship is based on performance, if the terms of the contract are broken, the relationship is terminated under penalty. In a covenant relationship, love is the basis of the relationship. If the covenant is broken, the offended party pursues the offender winning back their heart through discipline, grace, and love (Jer. 32:40-41). Obedience and mutual affection is all that is required for enjoyment of the full blessing of the covenant.
Under the New Covenant, God promises to pursue us in order to create a people all his own. God desires that we would be a people who would obey him from our hearts by a faith that works through love (Gal. 5:6). God promises four things in the New Covenant that the Old Covenant could never deliver: heart-felt obedience, personal experiential knowledge of God, Holy Spirit-empowered living, and life-transforming forgiveness (Ezekiel 36:25-26).The New Covenant is better than the Old Covenant for the New Covenant empowers us, the covenant partner, to keep God’s most precious commandments (Ezekiel 36:27).
In the New Covenant, we are placed “in Christ” (Heb. 9:15). Like Jonathan and David (1 Sam. 20:16-17), who shared all their possessions: all that is Christ’s is ours and all that is ours now belongs to Christ. All that Christ purchased for us on the Cross is ours. All that the Holy Spirit bestows is ours. Our all that Father grants is ours in Christ (Eph. 1:3).
Fix your heart upon the great and mighty God, who in His grace will work in you above what you can ask or think, and will make you a monument of His mercy. Believe that every blessing of the Covenant of grace is yours; by the death of the Testator you are entitled to it all—and on that faith act, knowing that all is yours. The new heart is yours, the law written in the heart is yours, the Holy Spirit, the seal of the Covenant, is yours. Act on this faith, and count upon God as Faithful and Able, and oh! so Loving, to reveal in you, to make true in you, all the power and glory of His everlasting Covenant.
Andrew Murray, The Two Covenants and the Second Blessing (Fort Washington, PA: CLC, 2005).
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